Sorry, I don't have any good links for you. It's been a while since I've been active, and most of what I'm thinking of is spread around hundreds of AfD (deletion review), article talk pages and policy pages. Much of the discussion within Wikipedia isn't all that great, either, with a very low SNR. I'm not sure that there's a single page which only covers the really good arguments of either side.
The quotes & arguments in the articles you reference are cringe-worthy, but then again I don't think they're very serious. I think the "Rationale for deletionism" section in your [1] is pretty okay, and something every inclusionist had better keep in mind when making a policy suggestion. As usual, it pays to know the opposing side's arguments very well.
I'm not sure that a detached outsider is in a better position to come up with what's needed to fix the system, being ignorant of both what the system is and why it was set up in this way. At least the latter is required before coming up with a new, improved system.
Newbies are good judges on the difficulty of entry into Wikipedia, but that's an orthogonal issue: it may be possible to be nicer to newbies AND have sensible notability criteria/high quality articles, but then again, maybe not. If not, as I said earlier, having less sensible notability criteria and worse quality articles may be worth it if it resulted in a less hostile environment/image.
> I'm not sure that a detached outsider is in a better position to come up with what's needed to fix the system, being ignorant of both what the system is and why it was set up in this way. At least the latter is required before coming up with a new, improved system.
I guess I didn't express my "detached outsider" argument very clearly. I wasn't trying to suggest that outsiders should dictate specific policies of Wikipedia's editorial process. That task should be left to those who actually know the community well. But formulating specific policies is not all there is to policy-making. Policy-making also involves philosophizing about general principles, such as "What kind of website do we want/need Wikipedia to be?" This is the area where deletionists and inclusionists seem to disagree the most sharply, and since debates in this area seem to have been in a stalemate for quite a while, this is the area where I think fresh perspectives are needed the most. It is also the area where one can make valuable points without having to have been a Wikipedia contributor for 5+ years.
If you interpret pg's suggestion as "You have plenty of space," then of course he's just rehashing the paper vs. toilet paper debate. But IMO the core of his suggestion is "There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica," i.e. radically more inclusive, more dynamic, more egalitarian, more accessible, etc. This is a matter of general principles and ideals, not specific policies. pg didn't suggest specific policies as an alternative to the current way that deletions are handled. Rather, he invited Wikipedians to step beyond internal politics and think more deeply about what role they want Wikipedia to play in the context of broader social changes. To call his argument "pathetic" merely on the basis of the "You have plenty of space" interpretation is to see the tree but miss the forest. Sometimes, forests contain dead trees. But that doesn't mean that the forest itself is worthless. To take pg's suggestion as a simple rehashing of old arguments among Wikipedians is to drag him down to the level of myopic nitpicking that much of the debate surrounding deletionism seems to have become of late.
The suggestions I made in my original comment do lend themselves too easily to the "You have plenty of space" interpretation, and I'm sorry that I couldn't express myself more effectively. I also learned a lot from the replies I got. I can't edit that comment anymore, but if I could, I might remove all those specific arguments and just focus on the maldistribution of burdens of proof. Because that's the kind of philosophical principle that seems to be lacking in all the nitpicking about unverifiable predictions pro and con. If Wikipedians can't bring themselves to stop obsessing about internal politics and reconsider what their philosophical commitments imply, at least I hope they're humble enough to admit that an outsider might have more interesting things to say about matters of general principle. A community that is all too ready to discount outsider perspectives is a sure sign of an ailing community that is trying to insulate its existing power relations even more from rational scrutiny.
> more inclusive, more dynamic, more egalitarian, more accessible
more spammy, more full of nonsense written by homeopaths and similar nutballs, more full of hateful crap written by Neo-Nazis and their ilk, etc. etc.
If you opt for the radically inclusionist policy, you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum. It's wrong, sure, but deleting it would be a tad... deletionist.
> you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum.
So what? Just add another paragraph to that page explaining the scientific consensus that anally penetrating yourself with silver won't cure cancer. (Believe it or not, Wikipedia actually has a rule requiring balanced coverage.)
You might even vote to move that entire section to a page of its own. (Does that also count as deletionism in your dictionary? What about article-splittism?)
Either response will take a lot less time and effort for everyone involved, compared to starting a heated and confrontational debate about deleting an entire article.
"If there be time to expose through discussion falsehood and fallacies, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927)
> Just add another paragraph to that page explaining the scientific consensus that anally penetrating yourself with silver won't cure cancer.
So you have multiple articles on the subject of cancer treatment, all repeating the same information and all needing to be updated one by one? Because my point was what Wikipedia now calls a 'POV Fork', or a new article explicitly created to push a specific POV as opposed to being NPOV.
Also, you're hitting up against something that inclusionists also complain about: Their pet POV Forks, the articles they demand to be allowed to own, keep getting deleted because Wikipedia already has NPOV coverage of that topic! Shame and infamy! Shame! And! Infamy!
> You might even vote to move that entire section to a page of its own.
I think that's pretty much the definition of a POV Fork, unless I misunderstand you.
> Either response will take a lot less time and effort for everyone involved
Not if you want all the articles on a given subject to be intelligent, factual, and balanced. Then you have to turn each and every (attempted) POV Fork into an NPOV article that's a clone of the article it forked off from.
The quotes & arguments in the articles you reference are cringe-worthy, but then again I don't think they're very serious. I think the "Rationale for deletionism" section in your [1] is pretty okay, and something every inclusionist had better keep in mind when making a policy suggestion. As usual, it pays to know the opposing side's arguments very well.
This is what Wikipedia "proper" has to say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in... (including a quote by pg that, at least without further context, is a good example of what I'm talking about)
I'm not sure that a detached outsider is in a better position to come up with what's needed to fix the system, being ignorant of both what the system is and why it was set up in this way. At least the latter is required before coming up with a new, improved system.
Newbies are good judges on the difficulty of entry into Wikipedia, but that's an orthogonal issue: it may be possible to be nicer to newbies AND have sensible notability criteria/high quality articles, but then again, maybe not. If not, as I said earlier, having less sensible notability criteria and worse quality articles may be worth it if it resulted in a less hostile environment/image.